Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge. Tom Bower
of her uncle’s profitable combination of business and politics.
Amiel’s return to Toronto in 1972 was auspicious. She started writing for local magazines, a divorce was arranged with Gary Smith, who cited her adultery with Bloomfield, and she began searching for a new life after what Bloomfield would later call ‘five aimless years’. By then her sexual relations with Bloomfield were rare. He was focused on his work, and was unconcerned whether she was sleeping with other men. He had steadfastly ignored her desire for children. In need of a man, Amiel approached George Jonas to resume their relationship. Her politics were shifting sharply to the right, she needed intellectual stimulation and a totally different life. By living with Jonas, she could concentrate far more on her own work.
George Jonas had been living for several years with Beverley Slopen, a literary agent. Amiel’s appearance in their apartment did not immediately alarm Slopen. She knew Amiel as ‘a hypochondriac who George might take for a weekend to the Bahamas but could not afford to take shopping’. She did not anticipate that Amiel would provoke a very public split between her and Jonas, after which Amiel returned to her apartment in Chestnut Park Road. ‘I’ve decided to leave,’ she told Bloomfield calmly. Bloomfield was not surprised. ‘Found someone else?’ he asked. ‘I’m going back to George,’ said Amiel. That news did shock Bloomfield. How, he wondered, after five years living with supporters of the feminist and anti-war movements, could she live with such a right-wing man? He never received an answer. Soon after, Bloomfield was called by Jonas and invited to meet at the Coffee Mill, his favourite Hungarian restaurant. According to Bloomfield, while they spoke Jonas took out a gun and showed it under the table. ‘I can’t live without her,’ said Jonas. ‘Don’t try to take her away.’ Jonas describes Bloomfield’s scenario as ‘ludicrous, the invention of a film producer’. Whatever the truth of the matter, the emotions of twenty-five years previously are evidently undiminished.
In her new life Amiel worked frantically, laboriously writing acclaimed magazine articles on various social issues throughout the night, carefully choosing each word in her efforts to express original opinions in a cautious climate. Simultaneously, she reemerged as a popular television pundit to disparage Marxism, feminism and Canada’s dependency culture. Trading on the image of a sexy intellectual, she showed off bruises at a dinner party and declaimed, ‘Sex is no good without pain.’ Together with Jonas she posed as a star with brains and beauty, charm and attitude. Those unconvinced by her self-education during her years with Bloomfield credited Jonas as her Svengali, dubbing her ‘the finest second-hand mind in Canada’. This further eroded her self-confidence, already undermined by the painful withdrawal symptoms after she had given up Elavil. She became fearful of cancer and other illnesses. Her critics spoke of borderline narcissism – which she interpreted as evidence of her growing importance.
Living with Jonas, a poet, journalist and political philosopher, was ideal for an aspiring writer. In October 1974, having discovered that Jonas was also Jewish, she announced, ‘I’ve made an appointment with the local rabbi.’ They were to marry later that month, in a synagogue, with only six guests. Over the following months Amiel’s self-confidence soared. Although she voiced a fear of being disliked, and hesitantly dismissed her urge for children as premature, she asserted absolute certainty about her political convictions. Having shed her last vestige of sympathy for compassionate government, she placed herself in the vanguard of the cause of restoring red-blooded capitalism to socialistic Canada.
Peter Newman, the mercurial editor of Maclean’s, Canada’s only popular political magazine, was impressed by Amiel’s right-wing, anti-authoritarian, iconoclastic criticism of modern fads. In 1966 she had written an astutely argued article, ‘Let’s Reinstate Debtors’ Prisons’, for the magazine, advocating that debtors who failed to pay their bills should be imprisoned.27 Ten years later Marci McDonald, a star columnist, resigned, and there was a vacancy. ‘Marci was a bitch,’ said Newman admiringly, ‘but we’ve got a bigger bitch to take her place.’ Amiel’s extreme conservatism, he calculated, would attract profitable controversy.
National prominence enhanced Amiel’s visible self-confidence. ‘She was the sort of woman,’ Newman noted, ‘who kept spilling out of her dresses, then blamed the dresses.’28 Her response to those who whispered about implants was savvy. ‘If I used silicone,’ she told Newman, ‘my breasts would be twice as big. I don’t do things by halves.’29 Fame and independence sparked her weariness with Jonas. Marrying a Jew, she discovered, was not such a good idea after all. His emotional needs were too similar to her own, and rather than partying, he preferred staying at home. Jonas was not the first man to discover the truth of her confession, ‘I’m polyandrous.’ One man could not satisfy her. She was constantly propositioned by men and women, married and single. The ferociously heterosexual Amiel wanted to experiment with most kinds of relationships and sexual antics.
Hanging around the Maclean’s office late one evening towards the end of 1976, Amiel noticed Peter Brimelow, the magazine’s handsome twenty-nine-year-old business editor, born in Lancashire, England. Drawing on her consummate experience, she made signals to encourage his approach. The long dark hair and green eyes of the seductress who had just been named ‘Canada’s most beautiful woman’ by a magazine was irresistible to the younger journalist, unaware of the licentious world he was entering.
‘I’ve got to go for an appointment,’ Amiel often told Jonas, with whom she was writing By Persons Unknown, a prospective non-fiction bestseller about a Canadian businessman who hired killers to murder his wife, a fashion model. In great secrecy she visited Brimelow’s flat. If she went away overnight, Jonas believed she was travelling on an assignment. Her infidelity evoked no crisis of conscience. As with her other relationships, Amiel’s self-indulgence was to please her latest admirer. ‘You’re a luxury,’ she told Brimelow in bed. ‘You’re of no use to me other than for sex and passion.’ Bites and scratches were his badges of her eroticism. ‘What makes people good lovers,’ she later reflected, ‘is not their sexual technique but their sexual being. Extremes of ineptitude aside, it is not how a man touches you, but who the man is that determines your sexual response.’30 The rawness was her attraction: ‘No matter how many times the act is performed, one is still in awe of its potential … whether it is done for love or for money, for spite of for kicks, the sexual act remains the key to our entire being.’31 Whether fooling around with Brimelow, joking about another affair with a Hungarian bankrobber who ‘stored gelignite under my bed’, or mimicking mutual friends, Amiel blessed her eternal youth. ‘I’ll never get old,’ she said. ‘That’s a battle I’ll never lose.’ The chilling implication was her preference for death rather than looking at a wrinkled face in the mirror. Inevitably, the relationship bore a cost. Brimelow was not the first to discover that losing one’s heart to Amiel meant a loss of self-control, and she enjoyed witnessing helplessness in her men. Lying in bed with Brimelow early on New Year’s Eve in 1976, she knew that later, while she was celebrating with her husband, Brimelow would be partying with a girlfriend. Seized by a mixture of insecurity and fury at her inability to control Brimelow, she dug the nails of both hands deeply into his chest, drawing blood. Brimelow’s girlfriend, Amiel smiled, would get the message.
Hard work, stylish writing, deep thought, exceptional looks and unconventional opinions had transformed Barbara Amiel into the nation’s conservative star. Describing herself with relish as a ‘very merchandisable’ right-wing pundit or ‘the redneck in a Givenchy dress’, she invited notoriety and a reputation for bitchiness as the Jew who criticised Israel, the advocate of personal responsibility and the critic of equal-opportunity politics.32 Without loyalty or deference to the Canadian establishment, the outsider reproached the natives. While pouting about her need for privacy, revelations about her sentiments in Maclean’s became the cornerstone of her journalistic shock. Like many celebrity pundits, she occasionally confused intelligence with wisdom. Her prominence transformed a spat with the Ontario Human Rights